The SciHub Data Part 2: Academic Pirates

Monday. May 23, 2016

You might remember my last post about digging into the data on where and when people are using Sci-Hub to get around paywalls. One of the questions that immediately came to my mind when they released the data was: How many people are actually using Sci-Hub to download publications while they are in universities? Because one of the claims that I (at least used to) hear quite often when debating open access is that academic researchers have nothing to complain about, because they can access all the literature in any case thanks to library subscriptions.

While this claim obviously ignores all the legitimate reasons for non-researchers to read primary literature (like, patients reading up on their illnesses – or just the general public who paid for all the research to start with…), I wondered: Is it even true? From my own experience I was pretty certain that it’s not the case, and I guess it’s not only because the University of Frankfurt is too cheap to pay for subscriptions. Which is why I tried to somehow quantify the extent to which academics are using Sci-Hub by looking at the download times in the last post.

A much nicer approach to quantify this would be to cross-reference the Sci-Hub data with known university IP-ranges, to see which downloads are actually made from inside universities. But for straight-forward reasons the Sci-Hub data didn’t include any IP addresses. So I did the same thing that John Bohannon did for his piece in Science: I asked for the data.

Because if you look around a bit (and nicely ask some people to help you in your search) you can find a list of around 5800 University/College IP ranges from many places around the globe. This list obviously has some shortcomings: It’s about 1 1/2 years old by now and the names of the universities are mined from LinkedIn and Webometric. So I would say it’s pretty safe to say that we are missing out lots of universities and their respective IPs with this list, so all measurements generated from this list should be taken as a lower bound.

In any case: These public address ranges could then be matched to the data held by Sci-Hub. They were so helpful to send me the anonymized and matched data in two levels of detail: The first data set contains the percentage of downloads done from those university addresses for each day. With this it is easy enough to see that academic use of Sci-Hub, while not completely stable, seems to oscillate between 8 and 10 percent on a given workday.

As you would expect (or at least hope), the number of downloads from universities does cut back over the weekends (and holidays like Christmas). And it also seems that there is some larger seasonality in the data, if you have good ideas where it comes from: let me know (One of you actually did, see the end of this article!). One important thing to keep in mind: This data is the worldwide aggregate, so different time zones will play into the weekday-calculation (and not all cultures hold their weekends on Saturday/Sunday).

If you directly compare the different weekdays to each other, you can see the weekend effect even better. All in all we might draw two conclusions from this: Firstly, academia never really sleeps. And secondly, we can answer John Bohannon’s question on Who’s downloading pirated papers? with a resounding Academics do for sure!.

The second data set that I received on the academic use of Sci-Hub goes down to the country level. But to protect the people using the service, the resolution of the data has been cut back. So instead of providing 24h resolution, data is grouped by 10-day intervals. But this still allows to compare the academic use between different countries, at least to some degree.

If we just plot the mean academic use for the countries included in the data we see a huge spread, with academic use ranging from 70% to basically 0% (the plot excludes countries with 0% academic use). The huge variation is in part due to the fact that some countries have very small sample sizes. Front runner Honduras for example only has 1,070 downloads in Sci-Hub in total, so a hand full of academic users can skew the value. On the other extreme, Peru for example does have a lot of downloads in principle, but the IP range data only includes 5 entries. Which might very well be an underestimation of Peru’s higher education landscape and thus be extremely misleading.

I nevertheless tried to see whether there’s some underlying reason for this distribution. The first idea I could come up with was the percentage of the population being enrolled in higher education. Again the Worldbank was useful to find some data on this. I used the Gross enrolment ratio for tertiary education across both sexes (title by the Worldbank, not mine). Plotting this against the percentage of downloads (and at least visualizing the bias in the data by plotting the total number of downloads alongside), we see very little influence of it. Which might be because the gross enrolment includes non-university level education, but I somehow doubt that this has much of an influence.

The second hypothesis I had was that it’s dependent on the amount of spending done on research in general: Once you start investing into research, having more academics around might lead to an initial increase in Sci-Hub downloads, which eventually might decrease because once you have enough money, you can afford the journal subscriptions? But that also doesn’t seem to be the case. I guess at the end it does not matter how much money you throw at publishers, you’ll never be able to pay their subscriptions.

Update 1

Jonathan Ready emailed me with an idea for why one can see this seasonality in the academic downloads:

You may already have many replies, but I guess the seasonality is due to the influx and egress of post-graduates during the year - dissertations tend to be written at certain times of the year and so there is a great rush on citation searches at that time. This clearly varies between countries but I am sure it is likely a major cause of this variation.

Update 2

After tweeting a bit with @MaliciaRogue I wanted to see how the download behavior in different countries changes over time. I not-so-randomly selected a couple of European countries that came to my mind and also some potentially interesting other countries for a small plot.

There are some cultural differences to see here, or at least that’s what I’d assume. For countries that have been heavily influenced by Christianity you can clearly see the Christmas holidays again. And looking at the weeks before Christmas in the Netherlands, the United States, Sweden and also Germany I somehow get the feeling that the protestant work ethic might be to blame for those pre-Christmas peaks.

Not too surprisingly Israel and China’s numbers are pretty stable over Christmas. But Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot can be clearly seen leaving their marks, as can Chinese New Year. Are there any more holidays you can spot?